One of the odd features of life in the US is the boasting (either overt or subtle) by professional people about how much they work. They seem to seek bragging rights about who puts in the most hours, as if the more hours you work the more important you must be. My daughter worked for a couple of years in the financial sector and sent me this article that illustrates the mindset of many of the people she encountered in that world. The author highlights a trap that young professionals especially can fall into.

Because fulfilling and engrossing work – the sort that is thought to provide the most intense learning experience – often requires long hours or captivates the imagination for long periods of time, it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job (and, therefore, the amount you are learning from it) by the amount of time you spend on it. And, incidentally, when a premium is placed on learning rather than earning, people are particularly susceptible to this form of self-deceit.

Thus, whereas in the past, when people in their 20s or 30s spoke disparagingly about nine-to-five jobs it was invariably because they were seen as too routine, too unimaginative, or too bourgeois. Now, it is simply because they don’t contain enough hours.

Young professionals have not suddenly developed a distaste for leisure, but they have solidly bought into the belief that a 45-hour week necessarily signifies an unfulfilling job. Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: “Isn’t this great? This is when I really love my job.” What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. “It’s as though he was validated, or making his life important by this,” she says.

Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours, they can quickly start to lose reasons for their existence. As they start to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself – and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked – people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives.
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Jane, Michael, Robert and Kathryn grew up as part of a generation with fewer social constraints determining their futures than has been true for probably any other generation in history. They were taught at school that when they grew up they could “do anything”, “be anything”. It was an idea that was reinforced by popular culture, in films, books and television.

The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.

Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.

I grew up at a time and in a country where this mindset was not present, so I did not fall prey to this kind of thinking. Also academia is an area where people do work long hours but because the research involves largely self-motivated learning, it does not seem like work, and since there is already a consensus that the work is worthwhile, academics tend not to brag to each other about the hours they put in.

Now of course, I am in the twilight of my work life, approaching the age when retirement becomes a factor to consider. Getting old is no picnic, mainly because your body starts to fall apart. But one of the benefits, if one is able to recognize it as such, is that you realize that because time is running out, many of the options that you once considered are no longer open to you, and so you begin to think of how best to maximize the benefits of the life you have rather than constantly seeking new fields to conquer.

It is not that one has become resigned to one’s lot in life. It is that one sees more clearly what options are realistically available and can then focus on making the most of them.